Mail Store Reccomendations

How large will these mailboxes be?

There is no enherent limitation on the size of a partition. Many sites that support mainly POP users keep all users in a single partition, because they don't save a lot of data.

If you expect users to keep large amounts of data, then you may want to partition, to allow the backups or disaster recovery to be more limited.

We like to suggest partitions around 200 gig each, but that's not even close to a "you should" kind of thing.

jay_plesset at 2007-7-6 22:30:08 >

> Well, the mail boxes would most likely be accessed

> via imap or Comms Express. So, they would be

> potentially as large as the qouta would allow.

>

> So for example, many of the boxes would be possibly

> be somewhere about 20 MB each.

>

> I guess what I'm getting at is, would it be wise to

> create 10 partitions with 5,000 mbx's each, 5

> partitions with 10,000 mbx's each or 3 partitions

> with 20,000 each. In terms of performance for

> accesses, backups, DR, etc...

Backups are the only performance issue. Access doesn't matter, no difference.

Backup is typically limited by disk i/o bandwidth. There is no hard suggeston, here. It's truly a matter of "tuning" it for your environment. Perhaps one of our Sales Engineers could help you, as they have access to the tools that might help. I don't.

>

> Is there a limit on the no. of partitions you can

> have (I could probably look this up in the manual).

no

>

> I'm just trying to what, in other's experiences, is

> the wisest way of handling this.

>

> I know that with my current configuration, I have

> Between 30k to 40k mbx's in one partition, However,

> it's not even 150GB of data. What concerns me though

> is that the files are all very small, so there are

> over a half billion of them. Backing this up is a

> nightmare!I also worry about running out of

> inodes. You almost have to waste a lot of disk space

> to create a ufs slice big enough to hold that many

> files.

>

> I appreciate any help!

Consider imsbackup. Designed to work on the mail server. Backs up to a single file per backup instance. You may run multiple instances in parallel, up to 10 or so.

jay_plesset at 2007-7-6 22:30:08 >